The present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for setting a bookmark for a resource accessed by a user, and for using the bookmark.
The World Wide Web (WWW) or Internet is a system of servers that support documents formatted in Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). HTML supports links to documents as well as to graphics, audio and video files. Links are references to documents from within other documents. Links allow a user to easily jump from one document or Web page to another with just a click of a mouse. Thus, a link can be a very useful Internet navigational tool. Note that Web page and document will henceforth be used interchangeably.
Another useful Internet navigational tool is a bookmark. A bookmark is available in most Web browsers. A Web browser is a software application that is used to locate Web sites and display Web pages. In the Web browser, the bookmark allows a user to store Web addresses or URLs (Uniform Resource locators) of Web pages into a folder, for example, a bookmark folder, so as to designate the protocol such as HTTP or FTP and the positions of objects, documents, Web pages or other targets in the Internet or Intranet, which will be helpful for later re-visiting.
When a user accesses a Web page that may later be re-visited, the user may bookmark the Web page. But, when the Web page is re-visited subsequently, the Web page is always displayed from its beginning. If the user wanted to return to a passage that is in the middle or near the end of the page, the user has to scroll down the page looking for the passage. This can be a non-trivial endeavor, especially if the document being revisited is a large one.
Therefore, what is needed is a bookmark having a function of displaying a specific section of the accessed object. In the prior art, a function of setting a bookmark utilizing the cursor position is provided for editable documents like Office documents. Specifically, when locating the bookmark, the editor needs to move the cursor to a position in the editable document where a bookmark is desired to be set, so as to perform bookmarking. Thereby, when the bookmark is referenced by UNC (Universal Naming Conversion) path in another editable document, a specific section of bookmarked document can be displayed.
However, the setting of the bookmark capable of directing to a specific section of an object depends on the cursor position, and the bookmark systems always require indicating the cursor position where the bookmark is located. For an editable document, this is natural, but this is impossible for a web page and an un-editable document like read-only PDF. Today, with the spread of e-books and soft materials provided by web sites, a new bookmark solution to bookmark these un-editable documents is desired.
Various solutions for web pages have been proposed. For example, US2004/0205543A1 discloses that, when the users are allowed to bookmark a Web page, the user may store, in conjunction with the URL of the page, the size of the window within which the page is displayed, the location of both the horizontal and vertical scroll boxes in the window and the font attributes used to display the page. This allows only the specific section of the page to be displayed when the bookmarked Web page is re-visited. U.S. Pat. No. 6,219,679 B1 teaches a solution which uses the coordinate pair of the top left corner and the bottom right corner of the display area as a part of the bookmark locator to define the section of the page displayed while being re-visited.